The Failures and Future of E-Voting in America

On December 7, 2006, seven U.S. attorneys were dismissed without explanation and replaced with interim appointees. This was made legally possible by a provision slipped into the USA PATRIOT reauthorization act in the dead of night by one of Arlen Specter?s assistants. A few short lines in a bill two hundred pages long; virtually impossible to notice, even for someone actively looking for it. Now imagine a programmer working on that BallotStation software. The only other people who will ever see this program are the few dozen other programmers working for the company; once it is shipped out, the software itself is turned from a readable script into the ones and zeroes that computers run on. That program is another secret; it is incredibly difficult to take those ones and zeroes and turn them back into something a human can make sense of, and even if it were possible, doing so is prevented by both contract and copyright law. The USA PATRIOT reauthorization bill was at most eig! ht or ten thousand lines, and someone was able to insert a clause into it without being noticed. Even a moderately-sized computer program can approach a million lines of code, and larger programs can be huge ? Windows XP, for instance, has an estimated forty million lines of code. That?s about million printed pages, or about thirteen hundred bound volumes ? at eight hundred pages a book. Even if it took fifty of those pages to write the code to steal an election (and there?s no reason to believe it would take nearly that much space) no-one goes through the code line by line before it is delivered. If the program works, it goes out to customers. And even if a malicious piece of the program was detected, it would be almost impossible to track the perpetrator down. Unlike the Senate, most software companies use programs which track any changes made, but security is not a primary priority for those applications. In other words, anyone who could make the change in the first plac! e could easily hide their own tracks.

By: Scott Bartlett

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Source: http://iblsjournal.typepad.com/illinois_business_law_soc/2007/10/the-failures-an.html
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